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		<title>My old domain registrar is trying to steal my money and I sold out to Google Voice. &lt;https://y.st./en/weblog/2016/08-August/14.xhtml&gt;</title>
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			<h1>My old domain registrar is trying to steal my money and I sold out to Google Voice.</h1>
			<p>Day 00526: <time>Sunday, 2016 August 14</time></p>
		</header>
<p>
	It&apos;s too late to cancel the FreedomPop order now; they&apos;ve shipped it.
	FreedomPop still hasn&apos;t responded to me though.
</p>
<p>
	While power washing the porch, I decided that I should at least try to scoot the large, heavy pond filter to another section of the porch, power wash under it, then scoot it back.
	While attempting to do that, I found that water was being sloshed out of a hole on the side.
	Why was the filter full of water? No wonder it was so heavy! We&apos;ve never actually used that filter as far as I know, so I&apos;m guessing that the water inside is somehow rainwater.
	The lid on top should have kept the rain out though, so I&apos;m not sure why the thing is full.
	After dumping it out, the filter became much easier to move.
	Furthermore, it doesn&apos;t appear to be an actual filter, but just the shell of one.
	We certainly wouldn&apos;t have intentionally filled it with water without an actual filter being present in there.
	I should have completely power washed the porch today, but I ended up arguing with my old domain registrar all day.
	I could have worked on washing the porch between messages to them, but I was far too stressed by them to get hardly anything done.
</p>
<p>
	Because of <a href="/en/weblog/2015/03-March/07.xhtml">the incident</a>, I lost all of my passwords to every account that I had anywhere online.
	Knowing that I wouldn&apos;t be able to get back into any accounts that had automatic payments set up, I had Discover mark my card as lost and send me a new one.
	My intent was that anyone with my old credit card number wouldn&apos;t be able to continue charging me and they&apos;d have to allow the services that they provided me to expire.
	However, that, as I learned today, did not go as planned.
	Apparently, credit cards have a feature that allows a merchant to set up reoccurring payments without holding onto the credit card information.
	Therefor, when the credit card information changes, it doesn&apos;t have any effect on the future charges.
	My old domain registrar has been charging me for domain renewals on three domain names that I can&apos;t even access! I noticed the latest charge, which occurred a couple of days ago, because I was checking for a refund from PayPal/eBay.
	I tried talking to my old domain registrar to try to get them to stop charging me (by turning off automatic renewals) and if possible, refund only the domain that they charged me for two days ago.
	I didn&apos;t even ask for a refund on the other two domains.
	However, they outright refuse to turn off automatic renewal unless I provide a notarized letter verifying my identity.
	This is insane.
	They refuse to accept state-issued photo <abbr title="identification">ID</abbr> because they think that it can be forged, but they somehow don&apos;t think that this notarized letter can be forged.
	I refuse to create further identifying documents though; United States citizens already have way too many identifying documents.
	They fail to grasp the fact that I have access to the credit card statement too.
	Even if the domain names are somehow not mine, the credit card <strong>*is*</strong>, and I am not okay with them continuing to charge it.
	I offered to send them my credit card statement to prove that the card is mine, and even said that maybe they should disable automatic renewals, but send an email to the email address that they have on file warning the domain holder that automatic renewals have been disabled and that they may re-enable them with a different credit card if they so choose.
	No dice.
	While the domain registrar is trying to screw me over, it&apos;s not the fault of the representative that I dealt with.
	Besides, it&apos;s hard to be angry with polite people.
	I made sure to let them know that I was aware that this was the fault of the company that they work for, not their own fault, and said that I hoped that I hadn&apos;t caused them too much frustration.
	Next, I headed on over to speak with Discover.
</p>
<p>
	My only choice as I see it is to file a charge dispute through Discover.
	Even the representative from the domain name company admitted that I was well within my rights to do so.
	In a best-case scenario, this dispute with prevent further charges and might even result in a refund for one or more of the three charges over the past year.
	In a worst-case scenario, all that i have to do is cancel my Discover card.
	While I greatly hope that Discover does their job and revokes authorization for continued charges from the domain name company, the fact is, if the account is gone, no further charges can be made.
	My Discover card is the best credit card that I&apos;ve ever had (though I admit I&apos;ve only had two), so I&apos;d hate to lose it, but it&apos;s also true that getting the card involved use of a telephone back before I started refusing to use a telephone number as a personal identifier.
	Simply put, I shouldn&apos;t even have a Discover card because obtaining a Discover card required telephone service.
	If I do end up having to lose my Discover card, in a way, it would only be the correction of a mistake, not the loss that it would feel like.
	It would feel like a loss though; I was able to get a card under my preferred name (as opposed to my legal name) through Discover, so without that card, online purchases (and anything that automatically renews) may never be the same.
	It sounds like the charge dispute will work though.
	I explained the situation to a Discover representative, and they said that they are going to give the domain company a full fifteen days before acting, but on 2016-08-30, they said that they will get back to me and initiate the dispute if still necessary.
	I let Hover know of Discover&apos;s decision in case it would make any difference, and am anxiously awaiting the thirtieth of the month.
</p>
<p>
	I finished my university readings for the week and moved on to work on the discussion assignment.
	Much to my surprise and delight though, there wasn&apos;t a discussion assignment this week and it sounds like there won&apos;t be any at all during the orientation.
	Discussion assignments are bad enough when they&apos;re graded, but when you&apos;re not even going to get credit for them, it seems like even more of a waste of effort.
	Don&apos;t get me wrong, I&apos;ll put in the effort, but I never learn anything from the discussion assignments.
	Basically, the whole class just sits around reciting what we all already learned throughout the week.
	I&apos;m not sure what anyone else is gaining from this or what we&apos;re expected to accomplish, but it just seems like lost time and unfruitful effort.
	Perhaps it actually helps certain people learn though.
</p>
<p>
	This week&apos;s assignment was simply to fill out our university profiles, which are visible to the other students.
	Uploading a photograph of oneself was listed as a requirement of the assignment, but as the assignment isn&apos;t graded, I just skipped that part.
	There&apos;s no reason that anyone needs a photograph of me.
	I did complete all other listed requirements though.
	It seems that there will be a graded journal entry each week too, though not during orientation.
	I suppose that I&apos;ll probably quote those in this journal, as it&apos;s my real one, and there&apos;s no reason to have a fragmented journal setup.
	With the only asignment done, I&apos;m done with the orientation for the week.
	School weeks at this university are measured from Thursday to Wednesday, so it&apos;ll be a few days before the next readings and assignment.
</p>
<p>
	I finally got around to fixing the <abbr title="Domain Name System">DNS</abbr>-leaking issue in my mail client.
	My plan was to replace the client with one that didnt&apos; leak, but that didn&apos;t end up happening.
	I went to the people of <a href="ircs://irc.oftc.net.:9967/%23Tor">#tor</a> for advice, asking what <abbr title="Pretty Good Privacy">PGP</abbr>-enabled mail clients that they knew of without <abbr title="Domain Name System">DNS</abbr> leakage.
	They said that the only one that they knew of was actually <a href="apt:icedove">Thunderbird</a>, but only with the <a href="apt:xul-ext-torbirdy">TorBirdy</a> extension installed.
	I don&apos;t even need to switch mail clients again! I went to the Thunderbird extension repository to find TorBirdy, but the description said that if one is running Debian, they should install it through <a href="apt:aptitude">Debian&apos;s package manager</a>, so that&apos;s what I did.
	For some reason though, the preferences were all in Arabic! I asked in #Tor how to switch the language of the plugin to English or Esperanto, and they told me about a bug in that version of the software.
	Purging the Debian repository version and installing from the Thunderbird repository as originally planned fixed the problem.
</p>
<p>
	My mother can&apos;t stand that my telephone number changes and claims that using the <abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr> gateways is too difficult.
	On my end, the email end, I could understand that complaint.
	To use the <abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr> gateways, I need to first figure out what carrier a number is even serviced by, then locate the appropriate gateway to use.
	It&apos;s a pain, but it&apos;s worth it to use an email address as my own handle instead of merely a ten-/eleven-digit number.
	However, on their end, the mobile end, all that they have to do is send to my email address.
	There&apos;s no lookups and no effort.
	It&apos;s just as easy as sending messages to a telephone number.
	However, with my mother&apos;s data usage going through the roof without Wi-Fi access around to keep it down, I was able to do something that I&apos;ve wanted to do for a long time: disable that blasted iMessage service on their iPhone.
	The iPhone by default sends messages using up data instead of using standard <abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr> messaging.
	Furthermore, because of a bug in Verizon&apos;s service, Verizon iPhones using iMessage don&apos;t work very well with the <abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr> gateways.
	Anything going to of from a Verizon iPhone through the <abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr> gateway will come out on the other side as an attachment instead of an easy-to-read basic message.
	I suspect that turning off iMessage and turning on <abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr> messaging will fix that.
	However, I also disabled <abbr title="Multimedia Messaging Service">MMS</abbr> messaging because it too uses the data connection.
	Without <abbr title="Multimedia Messaging Service">MMS</abbr> messaging, the iPhone refuses to send to send messages to an email address, as it doesn&apos;t want to send them via <abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr>.
	If I&apos;m being honest, Replicant has this same antifeature.
	A basic flip telephone can send to an email address using basic <abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr>, but somehow these more-capable mobile devices can&apos;t.
	I actually suspected that this might happen though, so I tried to contact my mother yesterday.
	My message of course got through, but they couldn&apos;t reply.
	Now, they have a legitimate excuse for not wanting to use the <abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr> gateway: they can only receive messages, not send them.
	With regular <abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr> messaging out of the question (as my mother complains about my ever-changing telephone number) and <abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr> gateway out of the question (because of the buggy software stack that demands that the data connection be used), I searched for an <abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr> forwarding service.
	I asked if anyone know of one on <a href="ircs://sbuk7aqcxkoyipwv.onion:49152/%23Android">#Android</a>, and they told me to use Google Voice.
	I dreaded that answer, but it was honestly the one that I expected.
	The problem with Google Voice is that it requires a Google account to use.
	The problem with Google accounts is of course that Google demands a telephone number, regardless of if you plan to make use of any of their telephone-related services.
	In this case though, I was trying to get Google to forward <abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr> to another number, so there was no point in trying to avoid handing over the number, or so I thought.
</p>
<p>
	As it turns out, Google Voice is in many ways a better service than what I was looking for.
	I was able to set it up to not forward to a telephone number, but instead, forward to my new Google email inbox.
	I can even reply to the email and the reply will be sent to the sender of the initial <abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr> message! The main catch is simple though.
	While clearly no telephone number to forward to is needed in this setup, Google demands that a forwarding telephone number be supplied, though it can be disabled.
	If the forwarding number is deleted, the Google number is also deleted and it seems to be impossible to recover.
	No new forwarding number can be added if there is no Google number, but without a forwarding number, Google won&apos;t allow there to be a Google number.
	This telephone-free setup requires a blasted telephone number that has been verified by Google! Thankfully, my telephone number will be expiring in about two months, after which, Google won&apos;t have a telephone number that reaches me.
	Furthermore, whenever I have the chance, I&apos;ll add any telephone number that I can (as long as it&apos;s not my number or won&apos;t be my number for much longer) to the account to further dilute their information.
	Also, use of Google Voice is in desperation here, but now that I have the account, that doesn&apos;t mean that I can use it for anything else.
	Because the account had me verify a telephone number, regardless of the fact that that number won&apos;t reach me for much longer, I cannot use the account for any other Google service.
	This account must remain isolated in every possible way.
	As a further catch, the main benefit of Google Voice (being able to make it look like I&apos;m sending from a telephone number instead of an email address) is it&apos;s second-to-main drawback as well (the main one being that a verified telephone number is needed to set up the account).
	If my messages appear to come from a telephone number, they don&apos;t appear to be coming from my email address.
	I should only use this account to contact people that I for some reason cannot reach via the <abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr> gateways, with the exception of my mother, whom I can reach but they cannot reach me.
</p>
<p>
	It sounds like my mother will be coming home tomorrow.
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